ORY OKOLLOH (KENYA)
A prominent Kenyan activist, lawyer, and blogger (www.kenyanpundit.com), Ory Okolloh is a revolutionary figure on Africa’s technological scene. Okolloh redefined the way in which the public supervises parliamentary activities when she co-founded a watchdog site called Mzalendo (Kiswahili for ‘Patriot’) in 2006. In 2008, she helped to create Ushahidi (Kiswahili for ‘Witness’), a site that collected and recorded eyewitness reports of Kenya’s post-election violence using multiple platforms such as; text messages, twitter and e-mail. This platform has become a global technological triumph (it is available in 10 languages) and has been used in various ways for information collection, visualisation and interactive mapping. There are even murmurs that the technology will allow groups like aid workers or election monitors to keep track of one another and note their progress without the information becoming public. Okolloh has passed on the reins of Ushahidi but continues to make waves in technology as Google’s policy manager for Africa.